ERP Consulting and Readiness Assessment
A fixed-scope engagement that documents how your business actually operates, identifies what an ERP would have to handle, and tells you whether to buy, build, or wait. The deliverable is a document, and it is yours regardless of what you do next.
Discuss your projectWhy this exists as a separate piece of work
ERP implementations fail more often than they succeed, and the post-mortems rarely blame the software. They blame requirements that were never properly established, processes nobody had documented, data that was far worse than anyone admitted, and a business that had not agreed internally what it wanted to change.
All of those are knowable in advance, and cheaply. A few weeks of mapping costs a small fraction of an implementation and routinely changes the decision — sometimes to a different product, sometimes to a narrower scope, and reasonably often to not yet.
We sell this as a standalone engagement deliberately, with no obligation to build with us afterwards. An assessment produced by the people hoping to win the implementation is worth less, and we would rather be checkable: the report is written so that any competent developer or product partner could act on it.
What you get
Process maps of what actually happens
Documented from watching the work and talking to the people doing it, including the spreadsheets and workarounds that sit outside the official process. Those workarounds are requirements, not bad habits — they exist because something is missing.
A data audit with real numbers
How many records, how many duplicates, which fields are populated in practice, where the same customer exists under three names. Migration estimates built on anything else are guesses.
A requirements document
Separated into must-have, should-have and would-like, with the business reason for each. The separation is the valuable part, and producing it usually requires the first honest internal conversation about priorities.
A buy, build or wait recommendation
Assessed against named products as well as a custom build, with the reasoning shown so you can disagree with it on the merits.
A phased plan with an order
Which module first, what it depends on, what temporary bridges it needs, and what each phase would cost. Phasing is what keeps ERP risk survivable.
A risk register
What could go wrong, including the organisational risks — a process owner who does not want the change, a dependency on one person's undocumented knowledge, a data problem with no cheap fix.
Who this is for
- Companies about to commit to an ERP and wanting the requirements settled before the money is.
- Companies that have had an implementation stall or fail and need an independent account of why.
- Companies choosing between NetSuite, Odoo, Dynamics or a custom build and wanting the comparison done against their own processes rather than against a feature matrix.
- Companies where different departments want different things and a written, prioritised requirement is the only way the decision gets made.
- Companies whose growth is now constrained by spreadsheets but who are not sure a full ERP is the answer — a common and entirely reasonable position.
How it runs
- 01
Interviews across functions
Operations, finance, sales, warehouse. Deliberately including the people who do the work rather than only those who manage it, because the two descriptions of a process rarely match.
- 02
Observation
Watching a day of order processing, receiving, or month-end. This is where the undocumented steps surface, and no interview substitutes for it.
- 03
Data extraction and profiling
Actual extracts from your current systems, profiled for completeness and duplication. Measured, not estimated.
- 04
Assessment and options
Requirements mapped against products and against a custom build, with costs and trade-offs for each.
- 05
Presentation and handover
We walk your team through it and leave the document. Expect to be challenged on it; that is the point of the session.
Common questions
Tell us what you need
Describe the problem and we will come back with scope, timeline, and a rate. No obligation to proceed.
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